No Man's Sky can still be called No Man's Sky, says Sky

Legal battle comes to light

Shares

Well here's an interesting final twist in the story of one of the most eagerly anticipated games of 2016: it appears that No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray has been busy battling British pay TV company Sky for the right to keep the game's original title.

"Yay! We finally settled with Sky," tweeted Murray over the weekend. "We can call our game No Man's Sky. Three years of secret stupid legal nonsense over." Sky owns the trademark to its name and can block other uses of it if there's likely to be confusion between two different services or products.

Microsoft can't register Skype as a trademark in the EU for exactly this reason (although it can still use the name). The Redmond company was forced to change SkyDrive to OneDrive over the same issue back in 2014.

The sky's the limit

It hasn't been a smooth development ride for No Man's Sky, with its release date pushed back several times, and having this legal case running in the background can't have done much to reduce the pressure on the developers at Hello Games. Still, it looks as though everything is now finally sorted - No Man's Sky arrives on PC and PS4 on 9 August.

The space exploration game gives players an almost unlimited number of algorithmically generated worlds to wander around, with the choice to engage other players in battle, harvest resources from planets, or simply see what's out there.

It promises to be one of the games of the year and has attracted a lot of interest since it was first announced at E3 2014, so it's good news that everything can go ahead as planned - it wouldn't have been the same with a different title. "[We] just couldn't think of another name," joked Murray on Twitter.